Comment by bob1029
24 days ago
> The second approach is to just write to the terminal like any CLI program, appending content to the scrollback buffer
This is how I prototyped all of mine. Console.Write[Line].
I am currently polishing up one of the prototypes with WinForms (.NET10) & WebView2. Building something that looks like a WhatsApp conversation in basic winforms is a lot of work. This takes about 60 seconds in a web view.
I am not too concerned about cross platform because a vast majority of my users will be on windows when they'd want to use this tool.
If you use WPF you can have the Mica backdrop underneath your WebView2 content and set the WebView2 to have transparent background color, which looks nice and a little more native, fyi. Though if you're doing more than just showing the WebView maybe isn't a choice to switch.
I like the idea of using a transparent background in the webview. That would compose really well.
The primary motivation for winforms was getting easy access to OS-native multiline input controls, clipboard, audio, image handling, etc. I could have just put kestrel in the console app and served it as a pure web app, but this is a bit more clunky from a UX perspective (separate browser window, permissions, etc.).